THERE have been big scientific discoveries before, but nothing quite as
huge as titanosaurs.

With some weighing in at the equivalent of 14 African elephants, and around
the length of four double-decker buses, the enormous dinosaurs were the
largest creatures ever to walk the earth.

That was before they were fully grown.

This month, BBC1’s Attenborough And The Giant Dinosaur will see legendary
naturalist Sir David detail the discovery and reconstruction of the remains
of a gargantuan beast he describes as “so large it defies the laws of
science”.

The tale begins in 2014 when a shepherd on a remote farm in the Chubut
province of Argentina spotted an odd-looking “rock” poking out of the
ground. That rock was actually a bone.

Scientists from the province’s Egidio Feruglio Palaeontology Museum were
alerted and confirmed it was an 8ft-long (2.4 metre) thigh bone.

They unearthed more than 220 well-preserved bones on the site — all from the
same, as-yet unnamed plant-eating species, part of the titanosaur genus.

Sir David travelled to Argentina to see first-hand the uncovering, cleaning
and examination of the huge bones and will reveal how — with the help of 3D
scanning, CGI effects and animation — experts pieced together details about
the lives of the hulking giants.

They calculated that each would have weighed 70 tonnes and been 37 metres
long, ten per cent bigger than the Argentinosaurus previously believed to be
the largest dinosaur.

And Sir David told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday: “It is amazing how
much information you can get from just one bone.

“If you measure the circumference of that (thigh bone) you will be able to say
how much weight it could have carried.

“So the estimate of weight is really pretty accurate.

“How long it was depends on how it held its neck out. Horizontally, it would
be about half as big again as the diplodocus — if vertically, it would be
about the size of a four or five-storey building.”

Talking about the documentary, Sir David added: “It’s about digging the bones
up and examining what sort of animal it was and why they died in the place
that they did.”